An Unknown Tongue: Voice as Method in the Work of Stanley Cavell

Abstract

With reference to the period immediately following the 1979 publication of The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell (1994: 58) once said, “if I had had then to give a one-clause sense of that book’s reason for existing it might have been: ‘to help bring the human voice back into philosophy.’” Appeals to the human voice; the theme of its philosophical suppression; and the call for its restoration are ever present in Cavell’s work. However, it is only in these later reflections that Cavell explicitly emphasises the extent to which a defence and attempted reclamation of the human voice in philosophy stands as a unifying impetus to almost all of his thought. Such reflections thus provide a crucial insight into Cavell’s methodological consistency across what might otherwise appear the disparate philosophical, political, aesthetic, cultural and literary paths that his work has followed. The distinct mode of criticism that Cavell has developed and practised throughout his career is, as Cavell himself often notes, inspired by the ordinary language investigations of Austin and Wittgenstein. In this thesis I argue that Cavell’s inheritance of the work of Austin and Wittgenstein is best understood in terms of his attempt to ‘bring the human voice back into philosophy’. One significant upshot of approaching Cavell’s work through the interpretive frame that I develop in this thesis is that such an approach facilitates a clearer understanding of Cavell’s unconventional approach to—and ultimate understanding of—the debate between ordinary language philosophy on the one hand, and various forms of (modern) philosophical skepticism on the other. Clarifying each of these notions and assessing the central place that they occupy in Cavell's critical lexicon is an essential step both in attempting to understand and assess Cavell’s critical perspective upon the tradition, and in evaluating his call for a restoration of the human voice in philosophy.